ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, January 5, 1997 TAG: 9701030116
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: 3 EDITION: METRO
COLUMN: WILLIAM SAFIRE
SOURCE: WILLIAM SAFIRE
ONE OF THE unheralded spies of the postwar era was Larry Wu-tai Chin. As an agent of Chinese-communist intelligence, he penetrated the CIA and served as Beijing's ``mole'' for more than two decades.
After his arrest in 1985, the spy - true to his training - foiled his captors and protected his superiors by using a plastic bag to commit suicide in his cell. Spymasters from Langley to Yasenovo agreed: Larry Wu-tai Chin was one great spy.
Memories of Larry are triggered by an unexamined facet of Clinton's Asian money scandal.
Chinese intelligence operations are sophisticated, patient, disciplined and underrated by a CIA-FBI counterintelligence culture still transfixed by Primakov's disciples in Moscow. China's primary intelligence priority is no longer to steal military or nuclear secrets, as in Larry's day, but is now politico-economic espionage.
You don't have to be a conspiracy nut to recognize that China needs not only to learn trade secrets, but also to discover - perhaps even influence - U.S. government trade policy and negotiating positions that directly affect the $35 billion balance-of-trade surplus essential to the growth of China's military and economic power.
This might fit that strategy:
* An Asian financial empire named Lippo shares with Beijing ownership of a Hong Kong bank known to be used by Chinese intelligence;
* The Lippo banking family, ethnic Chinese named Riady, climbs aboard the Clinton 1992 campaign;
* The family gives its former Hong Kong bank officer a $900,000 bonus and places him in a top-secret post in the newly elected president's Commerce Department, where he is privy to the development of policy ending restrictions on trade with China;
* The Lippo banker placed in Commerce continues frequent local and international telephone contact with his previous employers;
* On Sept. 13, 1994, James Riady and his Beijing-traveling lawyer (a founder of Little Rock's Rose Law Firm) agree with the president himself, in the Oval Office, to reassign the family's man from Commerce to the job of chief Asian fund-raiser for the 1996 Clinton campaign, and
* The Chinese-American banker channels in millions, and only newspaper exposure of illegal fronts for huge donations forces a reluctant Justice Department to investigate and a triumphant campaign to return some of the money.
Other strands: A Chinese-American restaurateur in Little Rock who travels frequently to Beijing raises more than $600,000 from fronts for the Clintons' legal defense, is then able to bring Wang Jun, the most notorious Beijing arms dealer, inside the White House to meet the president for a reason as yet unexplained. Meanwhile, another illicit contributor from Asia is given substantial presidential face time to deliver her pitch for trade preferences for China.
Is this a pattern of aggressive fund-raising, corrupt influence-peddling - or part of an intelligence operation?
The possibility of economic-intelligence penetration is beyond the depth of Mark Richard, now trying to contain the investigation within Clinton Justice. Another person who should be on this job is Paul Redmond, the CIA's counterintelligence chief.
Redmond got the Angleton mole-hunting chair at Langley because he developed a distaste for Aldrich Ames before it was popular. But because Redmond's central experience was with the Soviet East European division, his mind is not set Asiaward, and he is in danger of becoming what David Cornwell calls an ``espiocrat.'' His bosses are loath to unearth Clinton embarrassments, especially if the White House's Tony Lake is to be their new director.
But House and Senate intelligence committees should be asking: Have any of our assets in Asia been tasked to learn of penetrations of the Clinton administration? Has the National Security Agency been ``walking back the cat'' - putting its computers to work on miles of stored tapes, tracing overseas telephone or E-mail conversations of White House, Commerce, DNC and Ex-Im Bank aides and Arkasian middlemen with foreign officials or cutouts?
Such evidence could not be used in court. But on national-security matters, as Larry Wu-tai Chin's macabre victory taught us, it is sometimes more important to learn the extent of the damage than to put possible agents in jail.
- New York Times News Service
LENGTH: Medium: 83 linesby CNB